China has recorded the highest loss, at $238 billion, followed by India at $87 billion last year due to natural disasters such as tropical cyclones, floods and droughts.
The “State of the Climate in Asia 2020” released by the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) on Tuesday said Asia suffered its hottest year on record in 2020 as the mean temperature pushed 1.39 degrees celsius above the 1981-2010 average, which places 2020 as the warmest year on record in all data sets used for this assessment.
“The spread of the estimates ranges between 1.29 degrees celsius and 1.55 degrees celsius. The land surface temperature, sea-surface temperature and ocean heat content in the region show long-term warming trends larger than the global average,” it added.
The report said in 2020 floods and storms affected approximately 50 million people, including over 5,000 lives lost in the region, displaced millions of others and cost hundreds of billions of dollars, while wreaking a heavy toll on infrastructure and ecosystems. Climate and weather events had major and diverse impacts on population movements and on the vulnerability of people on the move in Asia throughout the year.
India and China suffered the most in absolute value from extreme events $26.3 billion and $23.1 billion, respectively. Japan, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Bangladesh and the Republic of Korea too suffered severe damage. Japan has recorded loss at $83bn and South Korea on $24bn due to natural disasters last year.
For some countries, the impact was significant when translated into percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), which was the case for India, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Bangladesh and Pakistan, where damages exceed 0.5 per cent of GDP.
But when the size of the economy is considered, the average annual losses are expected to be as high as 7.9 per cent of gross domestic product for Tajikistan, 5.9 for Cambodia and 5.8 for Laos.
Intense cyclones, monsoon rains and floods hit highly exposed and densely populated areas in South Asia and East Asia and led to the displacement of millions of people in China, Bangladesh, India, Japan, Pakistan, Nepal and Vietnam. Cyclone Amphan, one of the strongest cyclones ever recorded, hit densely populated coastal areas in Bangladesh and India during the rapid spread of Covid-19 in May 2020 displacing 2.4 million people in India and 2.5 million people in Bangladesh, the report said
The report further said in Asia, progress on food security and nutrition has slowed down and is not on track to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal targets of ending hunger and all forms of malnutrition by 2030. In 2020, 48.8 million people in South-East Asia, 305.7 million in South Asia and 42.3 million in West Asia are estimated to have been undernourished.
Asia accounts for more than half of the global total. Most children under 5 years of age with stunting or wasting in the region are found in South Asia (54.3 million and 25.0 million, respectively, in 2020).
